Hit Man (2023 | Country | 113 minutes | Richard Linklater)
Richard Linklater serves up a very tasty slice of an incredibly loopy premise. Glen Powell gobbles it up and makes it work through the power of pure, unrelenting, leading man handsomeness. Nothing wrong with pairing a director who knows how to have a good time with an actor who’s ascending to movie star supernova. Here the daffy vaguely-true story meshes with an intensely charming performance into a delightful gumbo.
Even if it wasn’t inspired by a real person’s actual story, perhaps most unbelievable is the casting of Powell as Gary Johnson (another “inspired by real life” figure; the source material for this rangy yarn was chronicled in 2001 in the Texas Monthly). The charismatic actor nevertheless squeezes into the role of an incredibly-nerdy Louisiana psychology professor like he was born for the part. A birdwatcher with a couple of cats and a wardrobe of knee-length jean shorts, he’s a contented loner who improbably moonlights for the New Orleans police force by building custom electronic gizmos for surveillance. The department’s main form of crimefighting seemingly involves an elite squad working out of a van to entrap citizens in the act of hiring contract killers to would-be murder-for-hires. You just have to roll with it, because the next improbable plot development is that they have to send in the electronics nerd to play the role of a hitman and he’s so good at it that he becomes their star impersonator.
Again, I can’t emphasize enough how dumb but also funny this is, particularly because of Powell’s commitment to his character’s fondness for theatrical disguises and the use of psychological profiling. As they let him run with this star performance, breaking up crimes before they occur entails a truly inordinate number of different costumes and personalities that riff on a hilarious array of crime movies. Real life and make believe get blurry for our dear Gary when a young wife contemplating murder as an alternative for divorce falls for one of his especially appealing alter-egos. It turns out that Gary likes this extremely sexy and mysterious version of himself a lot, too, and a series of ever unlikelier twists and troubles ensue as he finds himself juggling personalities to keep scoring dates. Linklater keeps it rolling, not quite lackadaisical, but with laughs, rangy charm, credible chemistry, and movie star power to make the improbabilities and big swings an incredibly fun hang.
This review originally ran during TIFF, when Hit Man had its North American premiere last year. Netflix is giving it a few weeks in theaters starting this weekend.